Sorry I haven’t been keeping up with your blog. Oh, you haven’t been writing any? Glad to know I didn’t miss anything.

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Here’s what happened: I got married to someone I didn’t know. I left a life I loved very much because I got married to someone I didn’t know. Our dreams fell through. We got good jobs we didn’t love. I chose a safe, relatively well-paying office job as a copywriter that turned full time after I finished my novel and had no more excuses about why I couldn’t work full time. There was depression. There was therapy. There was a rather lengthy period of instability where the word divorce lurked like a shadow. There was more depression, more therapy. More confusion about how things went so far sideways of what we had promised each other. I did not drink. My wild spirit felt the walls closing in, and she went somewhere. Wherever it is, far away from me, she goes to. I tried to dance. I tried to make friends. I tried to love Tampa. I tried to make sense of what was happening. I learned the office politics, I learned the way they speak. I got a new title and a director-level position. I had proven ability to perform other duties as required. I grew to fit the mask. I grew into Andy’s house after I grew too tired to fight anymore about why we needed to start our own life. I fought for my marriage. I fought for my sanity. I fought even though I felt low.

I miss you. You look so happy on Facebook!

I did well for myself in my new life with the name that I don’t really belong to.

I went a little mad.

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When I started this blog at the end of 2011, when I got in the car crash that catapulted me from North Carolina to the Florida Everglades to start a new life, the idea was that I would have a public forum to practice my ability to tell the truth, uncensored, un-re-revised, which, honestly, wasn’t that great. You haven’t heard from me since 2013–not really–although I did publish a handful of blogs about my work with animals in sanctuary, the crazy traumatology internship I decided to take, and the ongoing re-education of the white public perception of racism–a re-education totally related to animals in sanctuary and the crazy traumatology internship.

I did try to write to you, beloved. I tried. There were so many cool things I experienced: skinny dipping one afternoon with my gorgeous friend Kimmi in San Diego during whale mating season. I was pretty bummed you never got to hear about that. And Sam the Tiger. He died. I wrote to Jim, the man who cared for Sam, after Sam died and admitted that my time with Sam was the closest I have ever come to being with Jesus. I don’t mean that metaphorically, as though it were a religious experience. I mean Sam was, in all ways that I have ever been taught, a Son of Earth and a Son of God. I wish so much that I had been able to come home from my time with him and Jim in the last days and write about it, what it meant to me to sit in the presence of Sam’s embodiment of himself. It was Kingly, the calm of him, the absolute certainty of his sense of everything. Maybe one day I will, beloved, because it is something vitally important about the Mystery. In Sam, I met the Unknowable, and I loved it with all of my ability to love, with some crazy, outer-space kind of feeling, without caring whether or not that love was returned to me. Who am I to get that kind of lesson? What am I supposed to do with that? How do I explain the deep, deep, deeply comforting smell of tiger pee?

The last afternoon I spent with Sam.

But, I could not. I wrote titles, first paragraphs. Then: nothing. The writing wasn’t there. And by that I don’t mean I was resistant, lazy, posturing about writer’s block. I mean: there was nothing there. In me. Zip. Zilch. Nada. A dusty old well. That was that. My wild spirit was gone. There was nothing to say.

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Days dripped by. I quit telling the truth. I went to work. I called old friends. I studied trauma. I studied captivity. I related. I felt ungrateful. Privileged. I talked so much shit. I gained ten pounds. I talked so much shit all the time. About my job. About my husband. About my birth family. About having to get sober because how do you never ever ever get to take the edge off ever and fuck yoga. About my many friends who constantly post pictures of themselves doing yoga in bikinis on the beach. About the soul-sucking, aging Greek Week mixer that is Tampa, Florida. I found some friends at work who also love talking shit so we talked shit together. In canoes. On the sidewalk. At lunch. In the car on our way to volunteer opportunities that we also talked shit about. We talked shit and we laughed. Andy and I fought. But our fighting isn’t like fighting. It’s like ninja intellectuals fighting. Fighting about your emotions with no emotions. It sucks. No one wins.

We loved each other. We were sad. Andy called our therapist an asshole. During therapy. We saw another therapist. It worked.

I found ways to love my job. So did Andy. We moved into our own place in a small, funky beach town full of other weirdos. It feels nice. I made gratitude lists in my head. I started doing the annoying business of appreciating what I had instead of what I didn’t have. That also worked. We bought me a kayak and named her Necky Moore. We started reading Urban Tantra. Things got better.

This morning, I woke up and knew I would start writing again, that it was time. But, I thought I was going to get to write a mic-dropping blog on my perspectives of the current situation involving attitudes about race and racism after Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and the Dallas police officer massacre. I didn’t know I would have to write this overtly confessional blog first at a seemingly inappropriate moment socially. But, I don’t get to pick. The wild spirit returns from her wintering den, and She is.

Oh, Woman, where have you been?

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My dad, whom I’ll really-really write about at some point because oh my god, gave me only two pieces of useful life advice. But, they are so extraordinary that they negate all the other totally inaccurate things he’s told me:

“Marlowe, sometimes in life, you have to look at what you’ve done and go, ‘I totally fucked up there,’ and move on.”

“Things go bad. Then things get good again. Then they go bad. Then they get good. Then go bad again. That’s just life.”

Things went good. I fucked up. Then they went bad. I moved on. Now they’re getting good again.

10 Responses to I quit telling the truth.

This made me weep, in a really good way. I’ve known for a long time that you were suffocating on some level. I could feel you down there, swimming in the deep end and sometimes barely treading water, sometimes just coming up for air occasionally…only enough oxygen to keep going. You do such big, deep work, M.

Ha ha. Well, we’re connected. Did you get around to reading my novel? You might recognize the inspiration for one of the characters. 🙂 Suffocating, for sure. But yes, things are really getting better or I wouldn’t have been able to write about drowning. It’s funny like that.

Oh my, are you in my head or passing by my life. Trending in those deep can cause the walls to fall. I sheded a few tears for myself knowing that I am not alone. Streaming!!! What a wonderful truth!! I’m on my way there!

The dusty old well is part of the process. We don’t like it, but there it is, in writing, in relationships, in life — even though it’s never ever pictured on Facebook. Thank you for sharing your truth. I’m glad you’re seeing the other side of this.